Bacon's Rebellion, 1676

by Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker

But it was not possible for the dictatorial governor and the hotheaded youth to get along together. Berkeley was accustomed to having obedience in return for favors. Bacon was not the man to knuckle under. It was prophetic of what was to follow that the first difference grew out of relations with the allied Indians. When poor immigrants took up holdings on the frontier rather than become tenants to wealthy men in the east, they encroached on the reservations of those Indian tribes which were under the protection of the government. They even laid out farms within the very limits of their villages. When the Indians, driven by hunger, killed any of their cattle or hogs, the frontiersmen "beat and abused them."

Apparently it was a dispute with the Indians which caused the first temporary breach between Bacon and Berkeley. We do not know just what happened, but Bacon in a letter to the Governor speaks of his "unbecoming deportment in your Honor's presence," and said he was sorry for it. Sir William's reply makes it probable that Bacon had suffered some losses from neighboring Indians, and had retaliated. "This sudden business of the Indians," Berkeley said, had raised in him "high distemper." And he asked Bacon to consider that relations between the whites and the Indians was his responsibility, so that it was important that he be advised of all dealings with them. Should there be serious trouble he would be criticised both in England and Virginia.

Bacon must have resented Berkeley's monopoly of the fur trade. He tells us that a desire to have a share in this lucrative business had been one of his motives for settling on the frontier. But he made a virtue of necessity and, in partnership with his neighbor, William Byrd I, applied to the governor for a license. They would pay him 800 pounds of beaver fur for the first year and 600 pounds a year thereafter. This looked good to Sir William. "I am in no such plentiful condition that I should refuse a good offer," he replied, "and therefore am likely to accept your and my cousin Byrd's offer."

With the opening months of 1676 there were ominous rumblings of revolt. From New England came word that the English there were engaged in a deadly war with the Indians, which Berkeley thought was not merely a local affair, "but a general combination of all from New England thither." The so-called allied tribes on the Virginia frontiers were sullen and resentful. "They also would be rid of us if they could," said Berkeley. Their efforts to wipe out the English in previous wars had failed only because their bows and arrows were no match for the muskets of the English. Now that they had firearms might not their efforts be more successful?

It was the Marylanders who had given firearms to the Susquehannocks, a fierce tribe living on their northern border. This they did so that they could protect them from the Senecas, one of the tribes of the Iroquois confederation. But in 1674, when the Marylanders made a separate treaty with the Senecas, the latter fell on the Susquehannocks, defeated them in battle, and swept them out of their fortified villages. Fleeing through Maryland the remnant of the tribe established themselves on the north bank of the Potomac directly across from the site of Mount Vernon.

Here they were safe from their enemies, but not from hunger. They might catch fish from the river, but they lacked space for corn fields, and the plantations of the English spread out over what had once been hunting grounds. It was inevitable that they would seek food where they could find it, and having robbed nearby farms they could not resist the temptation to commit a few murders. Associated with them were the remnants of the Doegs who had been driven out of Virginia a few years before because of the "execrable murders" they had committed.

In the summer of 1675 a party of Indians paddled across the Potomac, and after killing several men, made good their escape back to Maryland. Shortly afterwards people returning from church found a man covered with ghastly wounds lying across his threshold, who managed to gasp out, "Doegs, Doegs." Immediately the alarm was sounded, and a party of thirty or more men assembled on the south bank of the river opposite the Indian reservation under the command of Colonel George Mason and Captain George Brent.

At dawn they crossed over to the Maryland side. Here they divided their forces, Mason leading part in one direction through the woods and Brent the other in another. Brent came upon a cabin full of Doegs. Their chief denied knowledge of the murders, but when he started to run Brent shot him. At this the Indians in the cabin made a dash for safety in the face of a volley which brought down ten of them.

In the meanwhile Mason, too, had come upon a cabin full of Indians, and had killed fourteen of them. But when he found out that they were not Doegs but Susquehannocks, he shouted: "For the Lord's sake shoot no more, these are our friends the Susquehannocks." But they now were their friends no longer. They began a series of bloody raids in Stafford County on the Virginia side of the river and Charles County in Maryland. Governor Calvert was quite right in complaining to Berkeley of the invasion of his province by an armed force to turn friendly Indians into mortal enemies.